Roundup: Historians' Take

Gregory Starrett: What Bollinger should have said

[Gregory Starrett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.] “I am only a professor, who is also a university president, and today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for. I only wish I could do better.” Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 24 September 2007 Back in the dark days of the American “culture wars”

Richard Thompson Ford: Why the Jena 6 protests have gone awry

[Richard Thompson Ford is George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. His latest book is Racial Culture: A Critique; he is currently at work on a new book titled The Race Card.] When more than 10,000 people converged on the small town of Jena, La., last Friday, the Rev. Al Sharpton called their march the beginning of the 21st-century civil rights movement. He may be right. And that's just what's worrisome. The marchers gathered to protest criminal charges brought agai

Eyal Zisser: Bashar Al-Assad – Calling for Peace, Preparing for War

[Eyal Zisser is Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University, and Chair of the Department. He is the author of several book, most recently “Commanding Syria, Bashshar al-Asad's First Years in Power” (2005) The following does not necessarily reflect the views of IPF.] The day after last summer’s war in Lebanon ended, on August 15, 2006, Syrian Presi

Steven Lagerfeld: Today we lionize the wealthy

Jay Gould, the wealthiest man in America, was only 56 years old when he died in 1892, and the general opinion was that he had already lived too long. "So far as his life and career made him conspicuous he was an incarnation of cupidity and sordidness," declared The New York World. The Herald reported that there was "much quiet rejoicing" on Wall Street. The New York Times weighed in with a relatively measured judgment: "It is in our time that the 'operator' has been born

Tom Engelhardt: Order 17

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.]

Juan Cole: Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.] Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited. The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia Universi

Rafael Medoff: Visit Iran? It’s Been Tried Before--with Nazi Germany

[Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org .] Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad concluded his remarks at Columbia University with an effusive invitation to the students and faculty to visit Iran’s universities. Ahmadinejad could be taking quite a chance, since, according to the State Department’s latest report on human rights in Iran, their college campuses are vir

Lee C. Bollinger: On President Ahmadinejad

... Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. And so I ask you: Why have women, members of the Baha’i faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country? Why in a letter last week to the Secretary General of the UN did Akbar Gangi, Iran’s leading political dissident, and over 300 public intellectuals, writers and Nobel Laureates express

M. Shahid Alam: Violence is endemic to Zionism

[M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, and author of Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on America's 'War Against Islam' .] In recent times, no nationalist project has been so completely mythologized by its partisans as Zionism. In the construction of nearly all aspects of its history, the official Zionist narrative is often at variance--even complete variance--with the facts as they are known to the rest of the world: and, more recentl

Frederick Kagan: Obama's "New Plan" ... for failure

[Frederick W. Kagan is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] IN A SPEECH THAT will no doubt be hailed by the left as bold and original, Senator Barack Obama today unveiled "his" plan for a "responsible" withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq by the end of 2009. The plan may be bold, but it is certainly not original. In fact, Obama's plan is extremely similar to one unveiled in June by the Ce

Deborah Lipstadt: Inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia University was a mistake

[Ms. Lipstadt is Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.] I am listening to the Columbia forum. Bollinger began with a truly hard hitting statement expressing his revulsion at all that Ahmadinejad represents. He challenged Ahmadinejad to invite him and a group of students and faculty to come to Iran to speak to university students about free speech, in the same way that Ahmadinejad is ben

Jon Wiener: Chemerinsky and Irvine ... What Happened?

[Jon Wiener is professor of history at the University of California at Irvine and a contributing editor of The Nation. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower.] The biggest academic freedom fight of the year was also the shortest — and the hardest to understand. Duke Law School professor Erwin Chemerinsky accepted an offer on Sept. 4 to serve as founding dean of the new law school at UC Irvine; UCI Chancellor Michael Drake wi

Peter Borsay: Are there parallels between binge drinking and the 'Gin Crisis' of 18th century England?

[Peter Borsay is Professor of History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published widely on British eighteenth-century urban and cultural history, his most recent book is a history of British leisure (2006), and he is currently engaged in projects on the history of Welsh seaside resorts 1750-1914, and on the 'Discovery of England' c.1860-1949. ] ... As an historian it is not for me to attempt an in-depth analysis of today's binge-drinking crisis. But, at least superfic

Ira Chernus: Glued to Our Seats in the Theater of War

[Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.] A week has passed since George W. Bush announced that U.S. troops will stay in Iraq in"a security engagement that extends beyond my Presidency." Last spring, those words would have evoked howls of pr

Tom Engelhardt: The American Audience in the Theater of War

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.]

Eric Rauchway: Chemerinsky, Summers, and Academic Freedom

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ] When the University of California Regents rescinded former Harvard president Lawrence Summers's invitation to speak at a Board dinner this month, it was too easy to link Summers with Erwin Chemerinsky: Just days before, the University of California at

Barry Rubin: Mythmakers about the Middle East

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (GLORIA) Center . His latest books are The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan) and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).] People don’t often threaten to murder me face to face. But in the spring of 2007, Alexis Debat, director of the terrorism program at the Nixon Center and consulta

Jonathan Zimmerman: Academic freedom is for all

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century” (Harvard University Press).] So it turns out that Erwin Chemerinsky is going west, after all. Last week, citing the Duke professor’s “controversial” public positions, the University of California, Irvine withdrew an offer to make him dean of its new law school. But it reinstated the offer after a firestorm o

Rafael Medoff: Columbia “Invites Hitler to Campus” --As it Did in 1933

[Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org)] Columbia University has invited a representative of the world’s most antisemitic regime to speak on its campus.  This week’s news?  Try 1933. Seventy years before this week’s invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Columbia rolled out the red carpet for a senior official of Adolf Hitler’s regime. The invitation

Niall Ferguson: The risk of President Giuliani

[Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.] There are two things that are futile to try to predict a year or more ahead: the exchange rate of the dollar and the next president of the United States. But let's just suppose the most probable thing -- based on current opinion polls -- happens. By that I mean that Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Party's nominati